The Confabulation of Trump

Transcription

1 1 Morten Tolboll The Confabulation of Trump The drive to find personal meaning or significance in impersonal or insignificant coincidences (Subjective validation) may be related to the powerful natural drive to create stories, narratives that string together bits and pieces of information into a tale. Of course, truth matters most of the time, but many of our narratives satisfy us regardless of their accuracy. This tendency to connect things and create plausible narratives out of partially fictious items is called Confabulation. A confabulation is a fantasy that has unconsciously replaced events in memory. A confabulation may be based partly on fact or be a complete construction of the imagination. The term is often used to decribe the memories of mentally ill persons, memories of alien abduction, and false memories induced by careless therapists or interviewers (see my article Regression psychotherapies). Have you ever told a story that you embellished by putting yourself at the center when you knew that you weren t even there? Or have you ever been absolutely sure you remembered something correctly, only to be shown incontrovertible evidence that your memory was wrong? No, of course not. But you probably know or have heard of somebody else who juiced up a story with made-up details or whose confidence in his memory was shown to be undeserved by evidence that his memory was false. In my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist (free download) Confabulation is a central issue. I here show how memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Confabulation is an unconscious process of creating a narrative that is believed to be true by the narrator but is demonstrably false. Young Earth creationists (YECs) provide an excellent example of Confabulation mixed with Motivated reasoning. To maintain their position, YECs must reject nearly all science and confabulate new laws of nature and rules of logic and evidence, and subject themselves to ridicule for their willful ignorance and irrational adherence to the myths of an ancient, pre-scientific people. The same we see within the postmodern intellectualism on Universities, which therefore justifies the tendency

2 2 within Management theory and New Age to confabulate stories which are not true (see my article Constructivism: the postmodern intellectualism behind New Age and the self-help industry). As management theorists say: It is not facts, but the best story that wins! So, in our time with the spreading of subjectivism and relativism - and therefore Magical thinking - we are seeing how Confabulation somehow gets a justification. There is in fact - as I claim in my articles and books on The Matrix Conspiracy - a New World Order emerging: the world of Alternative History, Alternative Physics, Alternative Medicine and, ultimately, Alternative Reality. That my concept of The Matrix Conspiracy is correct, is today especially emphasized by the election of the new president of the United States, Donald Trump, and his government, who are defending concepts of alternate truths about Trump s ideas, and fake news about any critique of him. This without much consequence, and without much protest from his many electors. Already now, another president, namely the Syrian president Assad, has found this inspiring and is saying that the allegations of torture and mass hangings in his country is the product of a fake news era (paradoxically enough, in the moment of writing, Trump has just ordered the missile attack on Assad). Trump is completely indifferent to what is true and false, never speaks positively about democracy, equality before the law or human rights. He openly admires foreign dictators, who define leadership as the ability to suppress the opposition and who led an election campaign where people who contradicted him were removed by force. So, we actually have a quite good idea about what we are dealing with. When fascistic, nazistic and communistic regimes took the power in the 1930s and 40s often after an election where they did well it happened with a combination of show, suppression and salami tactique, where layers of the opposition were peeled off one after one. The first, which leaders, who want to establish an authoritarian regime, go after, are the courts. They try to remove the judges, who might limit their exercise of power. And we have already in Trump s style and rhetoric seen a high degree of hostility towards judges. As a presidential candidate, he declared, that a certain judge hadn t the right to judge in a case against him, because he was of Mexican origination. As a president, he has referred to judges, whose verdicts were against him, as so-called judges. So, it is quite unusual for any American government official, not to speak of a president, to speak out so hostile about the courts.

3 3 The next target is the parlementary gatherings, which formally are maintained, but are deprived the ability to put up limits for the executive power. A future tyrant can use terrorism as a tool to usurp power. This is relevant both in Europe and USA because terrorism understandable enough in Europe s case takes so much attention. So far it hasn t been a big problem in USA, but mentally it fills a lot in peoples consciousness. Modern tyrants need terror, they need a group, they can stigmatize, they need people who are afraid. Now we have an administration in USA, which talks about terrorism all the time, which associates muslims with terrorists and which could be reacting on terror-actions, when they occur, by suspending fundamental rights. And because Trump so openly admirers Putin and speaks of him as a strong leader, a man who is an expert in terror-management, who used the threat of Chechnya terror to build up an authoritanian rule and has done the state of emergency permanent. Another paramount element in a potential tyrant s takeover is of course the fight for the opinion-forming. Trump s permissiveness dealings with easily verifiable facts is wellknown and the medias are themselves full of debates about fake news and the post-factual society. What the debate lacks is an understanding of the connection between the doubt about facts and an authoritanian political development. Post-truth is pre-fascism! There is a fundamental relationship between our opinions about what is truth, and the political risk of fascism, and it is important we understand it. The people who stand behind the Post-truth-industry who, for example are responsible for the Russian medias are fully aware that democracy is dependent on the rule of law, and the rule of law is dependent on trust. If you can make a large part of the population believe, that there are no truths, that all facts are uncertain, that everything are depending on the eye of the beholder, then the citizens have no basis criticizing the power, because you can t formulate a critique without the existence of factuality. If we reach the complete post-factual level, the political society will be impossible, also the rule of law and the civil society. Then it will be the person who has the biggest megaphone or is the best to produce TV shown, who wins. Remember the management theorists slogan: It is not facts, but the best story that wins! The management theorists are leading Matrix Sophists. The people who stands behind the spread of fake news know all this. It is therefore they do it. So, when president Trump for example spread completely undocumented information about that Obama has ordered him monitored, then it is not only a lie he is caught in saying; it is part of the war against truth. And it is something he is doing

4 4 all the time. It is a part of the destibilization of the nation s whole way of communication. It is all manifested in Trump s Mussolini-like facial expressions. Don t ease up with an authoritarian rule s wishes! Defend the institutions! Stand by your professional ethic! Take care of language! Believe that truth exists! Keep the head cold during terror attacks! Don t get used to Swastikas and other symbols of hate! Guard your private informations! Be alert to para-military units! Be so brave as you can! Remember anti-authoritarian thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and George Orwell! They seem to have been forgotten. The name Newspeak is the name George Orwell gave the language, which the rulers in his dystopian novel 1984, had created. The intention with it is to control thinking, to make some ideas impossible to think, including concepts such as good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly. In this connection they are using concepts such as old-thinking and new-thinking, so that people get a feeling of guilt, everytime they use concepts within old-thinking. The rulers are doing this by connecting concepts within old-thinking with the word thought-crime. The overriding intention is of course to eliminate critical thinking, or said in another way: that people think for themselves. NewSpeak is today widespread in the positive thinking environment (which is rooted in the New Thought movement, and supported by constructivism see my articles The New Thought Movement and the law of attraction and Constructivism, the postmodern intellectualism behind New Age and the self-help industry). A long line of old words which according to the ideals of positive thinking are negative, are in our society systematical being replaced with new, more positive sounding words. The idea is that you through thoughts and language can eliminate negativity and suffering. Problems are being given positive names, whereby they either are being hidden, denied or simply not are being acknowledged as problems. This is especially seen in the business industry and in the working life. Quite superior words such as problems and difficulties have been transformed to possibilities and challenges. Within NLP the word failure has been changed to feedback, and many NLP practitioners directly say that there is no such thing as failure there are only positive feedback or delay (see my article Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)).

5 5 The list over expressions of problems, which in the name of positive thinking, has become converted into something promising, is very long. Guilt has been changed to responsibility, evil to inappropriateness, crisis to growth-potential, dismissals to new beginnings, to be unsatisfied to to seek new challenges, suffering to stress, colleague to fellow player, work to career, problem-orientation to solutionorientation, human working capacity to human resource, sacking to setting free, conclict to conflict-solution, critique to response, leadership to self-leadership, etc., etc. In the working life people are today educated to think positively, both about themselves and about others, to communicate positively, and to speak with positive words and phrases, which turn problems into challenges. The whole idea is that negativity simply doesn t exist, except in our thoughts and language. There only exists positivity in the world itself (that is: what the positive thinking movement itself believes is positivity note how we already here see problems with the idea). On July 23, 2012, in San Jose, California., 21 people were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called Unleash the Power Within, starring Tony Robbins. The American journalist Oliver Burkeman is the author of the book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can t Stand Positive Thinking. In an article called The Power of Negative Thinking Burkeman is asking in a comment to the firewalker incident: What, exactly, did they expect would happen? In fact, there s a simple secret to firewalking : coal is a poor conductor of heat to surrounding surfaces, including human flesh, so with quick, light steps, you ll usually be fine. But Mr. Robbins and his acolytes have little time for physics. Burkeman says: to them, it s all a matter of mind-set: cultivate the belief that success is guaranteed, and anything is possible. One singed but undeterred participant told The San Jose Mercury News: I wasn t at my peak state. Burkeman asks: What if all this positivity is part of the problem? What if we re trying too hard to think positive and might do better to reconsider our relationship to negative emotions and situations? A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to

6 6 eliminate the word failure from your vocabulary but then you ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes. The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has persuasively argued that the all-positive approach, with its rejection of the possibility of failure, helped bring on our present financial crises. The psychological evidence, backed by ancient wisdom, certainly suggests that positive thinking is not the recipe for success that it purports to be. Americans are a "positive" people - cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is their reputation as well as their self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told. In the utterly original debunking book Bright-Sided How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worst of all, to the business community, where the refusal to consider negative outcomes - like mortgage defaults - contributed directly to the current economic disaster. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of positive thinking: personal self-blame and national denial. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best - poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage. She begins her book with a chapter called Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer, where she tells that the first attempt to recruit her into positive thinking was when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She experienced that everything and everybody around her tried to make her realize that breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance it is a gift, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. Another example is a New Thought online expert, who not only advised her client to remove the word critique from his online-material, but also to remove all judgmental terms. If he should take that literally, he might as well close his website. Communal reinforcement is a social phenomenon in which a concept or idea is repeatedly asserted in a community, regardless of whether sufficient evidence has been presented to support it. Over time, the concept or idea is reinforced to become a strong belief in many people s minds, and may be regarded by the members of the community as fact. Often, the concept or idea may be further reinforced by publications in the mass media, books, or other means of communication. There is no doubt about that The

7 7 Matrix Conspiracy (which is a strong advocate for the use of hypnosis and hypnotherapy) will be made propaganda for through mass media phenomena such as Transmedia Storytelling, Alternate Reality Games (for example The Blair Witch Project), Viral Marketing/Internet Hoaxes and Collaborative Fiction. The phrase millions of people can t all be wrong is indicative of the common tendency to accept a communally reinforced idea without question, which often aid in the widespread acceptance of urban legends, myths, and rumors. The new New Age product called the WingMakers Project is an attempt to create an alternative history. It is not directly an example of Confabulation, since the creators of the website hardly believe their story to be true, but it will certainly create confabulation in others (see my article Time travel and the fascism of the WingMakers Project). Science has partly replaced ancient myths. But it can t explain everything, and therefore many feel the need for a new and modern mythology. That is precisely what the American website wingmakers.com offers. The origin of the mythology is an important part of the story on this website. We are told that two students, who in 1996 were hiking in the desert in the northern New Mexico, near an ancient archaeological site, called Chaco Canyon, found a mystical metallic artifact from space. A classified UFO department in the American security service NSA was assigned to investigate the discovery. This department is called the Advanced Contact Intelligence Organization (ACIO). The place for the discovery was called The Ancient Arrow site, and the assignment for ACIO was called The Ancient Arrow Project. The artifact, which becomes known among ACIO operatives as the Compass, led them to a large, spiral cave system of chambers, which was created in the year 826 by beings from a distant galaxy. These beings call themselves WingMakers. WingMakers are time travelers from 750 years in the future, and have therefore traveled back in time to the year 826 in order to place time capsules here. They are shortly said future models of ourselves, who travel in time, in order to correct genetic and historical flaws. We see here, that the WingMakers Story is based on the theory of time travel, which claims that history is flexible and is subject to change (Plastic Time). In each chamber there was a wall painting and a technological artifact from space. In the last chamber the artifact was an optical disc presumably holding the information

8 8 about the site s creators and their purpose. After considerable effort to access the optical disc, the ACIO team, led by Jamisson Neruda, finally succeeds, and determines the creators of the site as the WingMakers. Over 8000 pages of philosophy, poetry, music, genetics, sub-dimensional equations, and cosmology are contained within the disc. This cave system is the first of seven so-called time capsules, spread around the world. The last six time capsules are yet to be discovered. The optical disc was leaked one year after the discovery, and a part of the contents has thereafter ended up on wingmakers.com. The webmaster Mark Hempel says, that he is just passing on, what he is told by a contact person (Sarah de Rosnay). In 2001, though, Hempel was contacted by a new person, James, who claims, that it is him who is the mastermind behind. Sarah de Rosnay is only his assistent. So, James is the creator of the WingMakers material. He is claimed to be a specialist from the WingMakers, and an expert in transposing Tributary Zones to three dimensional space/time worlds in the form of encoded sensory data streams. In other words, he is a kind of what Hindu religion calls an Avatar. In Western terminology he would be known as a Messiah. I will return to the website s problem of using obscure language about very known concepts. James also suddenly began to answer the inquiries of interested individuals through the site s webmaster, Mark Hempel, who acts as liaison (in 2001). James it is told - was born as a human with very human parents. If you examined his DNA at birth you would find very little difference from your own. He is said to be a multidimensional being who lives simultaneously in a spectrum of realities. He says himself: My dominant reality is different than yours. Because of this difference, I am able to process this human reality at a different frequency rate, which enables me to perceive behind and beyond the three-dimensional surface of this reality. James furthermore states: As a result of this ability, I am able to translate art, music, poetry, philosophy, and scientific insights that are from my dominant reality into yours. In so doing, I have translated sensory data that will catalyze future discoveries that will redefine the human soul. I am a teacher of encoded sensory data streams and was trained, at my request, to embody as the human translator of the galactic Tributary zones, making them intelligible to the human race of the 21 st century. The website contains an (overwhelming) introduction, a half book (The Ancient Arrow Project Novel) about how the chambers was discovered, and Sarah de Rosnay s four long interviews with the person, who leaked the optical disc (Dr. Jamisson Neruda).

9 9 The interviews can be read in extension of the book. They tell an even more fantastic story about how ACIO for a long time had been in contact with beings from other planets. They exchange knowledge and co-operate about the development of new technology, which makes possible clairvoyance, materializations, time travel and much more. Examples are Light Encoded Reality Matrix (LERN), Memory Restructure Program (MRP), Remote viewing Technology (RV), Personal Mole Tracking Devices (PMs), and of course Blank Slate Tecknology (BST), which is about interactive time travel, which purpose is to deflect the prophesied Animus from Earth. Here we see the inspiration from the Montauk Project. So, there are also hostile beings (Animus), who want to take over Earth because of its great biological variation. They namely want to reproduce themselves by means of our genes. But WingMakers is the most sophisticated race, it is said. They are the central race in the universe, and the first race, which was created by God. They have genetically created us humans, and they guard us. The also help us to develop ourselves, and around year 2080 a great deal of mankind will have realized The Soul or The self. For those, who want to deepen themselves more in WingMakers spiritual teaching, there are four philosophical texts, and James responses to questions. Moreover, the website contains the 24 wall paintings, 48 poems and extract of pieces of music. It is all divided in relation to the 24 chambers in this time capsule, and the meaning is that they shall have a transcendent effect and in this way be a portal to other dimensions of reality. The seven time capsules are also called DNA triggers. Altogether genetics is a central concept on the website. The website is incredibly extensive, worked through, and beautiful done. It is a mythology, which wants something a fantastic synthesis of science fiction, ufology, parapsychology, theosophy and conspiracy theory. The WingMakers Project is an attempt to create an alternate history. Alternative history or alternate history is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. Since the 1950s this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of our universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines.

10 10 WingMakers is also a so-called secret history. A secret history (or shadow history) is a revisionist interpretation of either fictional or real (or known) history, which is claimed to have been deliberately suppressed, forgotten, or ignored by established scholars. Originally, secret histories were designed as non-fictional, revealing or claiming to reveal the truth behind the spin. Today we see how secret history sometimes is used in a long-running science fiction or fantasy universe to preserve continuity with the present by reconciling paranormal, anachronistic, or otherwise notable but unrecorded events with what actually happened in known history; for instance in the fictional time travel theories. The WingMakers story combines this with the urban legend and alternate history from the Ong s Hat myth. Though the WingMakers website tries to avoid critique by saying it is a modern mythology (where urban legends are considered as a modern folklore) it also keeps on, precisely as in urban legends, to insinuate that the story is true. It is therefore a piece of pseudohistory. Pseudohistory is purported history such as Afrocentrism, creationism, holocaust revisionism and the catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky. Pseudohistory should be distinguished from the ancient texts it is based on. The sagas, legends, myths and histories, which have been passed on orally or in written documents by ancient peoples are sometimes called pseudohistory. Some of it is pseudohistory, some of it is flawed history and some of isn t history at all. Pseudohistory should also be distinguished from historical fiction and fantasy. Anyone who cites a work of historical fiction as if it were a historical text is a practising pseudohistorian. There are also writers of historical fiction who intentionally falsify and invent ancient history. A technique to do this is to claim to find an ancient document and publishing it in order to express one s own ideas. An example is The Celestine Prophecy. A variation on this theme is to claim that one is channeling a book from some ancient being, e.g, The Urantia Book, Bringers of the Dawn, and A Course in Miracles (see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with channeling). New Age is permeated with references to vibrations and energy, advices to avoid the negative (you can tell good people by their eyes), stop doubting, follow your intuitions and premonitions, flow with coincidences, believe in the purposiveness of everything, join thousands of others on the quest, turn into your feelings and evolve to a higher plane. Follow your intuitions and dreams as you go through your spiritual evolution. Fact or fiction, it doesn t matter. Truth is what you make it. Life s too short and too complicated to deal with reality. Make your own reality.

11 11 This New Age subjectivism and relativism encourage people to believe that reality is whatever you want it to be. The line between fact and fiction gets blurry and obscured. Subjectivism shuts down people s critical faculties, making them suggestible for any ideology. It involves making people quit thinking critically in order to open them up to thinking Magical about that Subjective validation and Communal reinforcement lead to bliss. Hypnosis is in New Age directly used as a means for inducing in people certain worldviews (see my article Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the art of self-deception). The subjectivism in the WingMakers Project can be seen in the question about whether the WingMakers material is fact or fiction. The introduction to the project says as follows: It is fact wrapped in fiction otherwise known as myth. So here we see how subjectivism is used as an attempt to get the line between fact and fiction blurry and obscured. It is also an attempt to avoid critique. Without success, because the story, as mentioned, ends in pseudohistory. As mentioned, in the last chamber in the cave system in the desert, was found an artifact from outer space; an optical disc presumably holding the information about the site s creators and their purpose. And, as mentioned, after considerable effort to access the optical disc, the ACIO team finally succeeds, and determines the creators of the site as the WingMakers. And, I m sure, out of this artificial artifact also stepped The Confabulation of Trump. All articles and books referred to are available in free PDF Versions. Links can be found on my blog: Copyright 2017 by Morten Tolboll. Terms of use: